Layers of bad news: OECD says carbon pricing is far too low to fight global warming – an 80% shortfall! But peel back the layers and the story is much worse. The cost of carbon they use for that calculation is seriously low-balled, so the real shortfall should be much higher. And then, deep in the OECD report, we learn that the benefits of motor fuel tax are double-counted – it seems we already needed that money to pay for costs of traffic congestion, local air pollution, and people run over by cars, so there’s little, if anything, left for carbon pollution. Then, following up the OECD’s sources for that double-counting calculation we see that this, too, is understated – it completely ignores the multiplier effects of driving & damage from chasing pedestrians and cyclists off the road. And, finally, if we pay for all that environmental damage with fuel tax, who pays for the roads themselves?

The carbon pricing report is undoubtedly put together by people with a great concern about global warming and effective climate policy, and they’re delivering some bad news. Yet it is hard not to see it as an example of what Kevin Anderson (@kevinclimate) has described: that most of the policy and advocacy and even the science of climate change is presented in colossally over-optimistic scenarios. Let’s peel back the layers to see how that works. Continue reading →

There’s a lot of decent stuff in Jeremy Corbyn’s Build it in Britain speech: reduce the role of the City, provide better training. But overall, his prescription for improving British manufacturing it is not convincing, for two reasons.

Making the public sector buy British would expensive and not very effective – there are better approaches to industrial policy. Worse, the real political importance of this plan is that it is a new excuse (the old ones having shown themselves flimsy) for leaving the Single Market: don’t buy it, it is a poison pill.

The good stuff – the City, training – shows no evidence of understanding the deep institutional obstacles to achieving what he proposes, obstacles which for all its theatrical radicalism the current Labour leadership is not willing to face squarely (IMO, unwilling because doing so would spoil the theatre of revolution).

Here I’ll deal with the first item, and leave the City & training for a future post. Continue reading →

IMO, however, Shapiro underestimates support for the Russian oligarchy within the US power structure. This because he frames Russian state interests and objectives in a very abstract, general way. Russia today is not a superpower but a fossil fuel power which happens to have a legacy nuclear arsenal: net fuel exports are 17% of Russia’s GDP, extraordinarily high for such a large country. Stabilizing earth’s climate requires leaving fossil fuels in the ground, and that would shatter the Russian oligarchy. Putin’s interests thus align with the know-nothing, no-action position taken by the GOP, and Trump, on climate. That is the material basis for a political relationship between the Russian state and conservative US politicians, which has been developing for some time. The historic antipathy of the Republican Party to Russia is based on anti-communism, not anti-petro-fascism.